


Now More Than Ever Seems it Rich to Die

by blackest_eyes



Category: 1917 (Movie 2019)
Genre: Angst, Canon Universe, Gen, POV First Person, Will-centric, and all the things will has already lost that are worse to lose than his own life, but still please be warned, it's a meditation on accepting death, it's not graphic or violent at all, no beta we die like men, or not depending on how you look at it, this whole thing is about death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:07:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23521300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackest_eyes/pseuds/blackest_eyes
Summary: The first time it came, I fought and fought, I brought my dead, frozen body back to life and forced it to swim, to walk, to run, to survive. But not for me. Never for me.For you.The second time it came, I had nothing left to hold on for. It was done. I was done. I didn’t let you down.Life is not the worst thing to lose. It is a friend, a lover, a relative, yourself.*Will's meditation on what it means to die and why, when it comes, he feels he has lost more in life than death can take from him.
Comments: 15
Kudos: 17
Collections: 2nd devons writing challenges, Not Just Another War Movie





	Now More Than Ever Seems it Rich to Die

**Author's Note:**

> A response to a prompt in the 2nd Devons discord server fortnightly writing event. Mine is the shortest of them all, sorry it's so brief but I think it would have just dragged if I tried to flesh it out! It's just a little vignette.
> 
> Please go read everyone else's entries as they are beautiful and a lot less sad than this!
> 
> The title is a quote from Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale', my absolute favourite poem which you should all go read! I'll put another stanza of it below that is also fitting to this fic...
> 
> "Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget  
> What thou among the leaves hast never known,  
> The weariness, the fever, and the fret  
> Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;  
> Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,  
> Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;  
> Where but to think is to be full of sorrow  
> And leaden-eyed despairs,  
> Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,  
> Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow."

**“Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;**

**But young men think it is, and we were young.”**

It was nothing like you’d expect it to be.

People spend their whole lives afraid to die, running from the one thing they are hurtling towards. Perhaps that is what has made these three years so bloody. We have to kill, else we will die. We have to fight, with bared teeth and claws and metal, else we will die. We will die either way. I wonder if it would have been different if we’d realised earlier that it is not the worst thing in the world to die.

The first time it came, I fought and fought, I brought my dead, frozen body back to life and forced it to swim, to walk, to run, to survive. But not for me. Never for me.

For you.

The second time it came, I had nothing left to hold on for. It was done. I was done. I didn’t let you down.

Life is not the worst thing to lose. It is a friend, a lover, a relative, yourself.

I lost my mind many times in life. It slipped away on sleepless nights and stood, hand in hand with my youth, just out of reach. But in death, it returned to me and I saw very clearly that there are worse things than this. I had done worse things than die. I had killed. I had left my family behind. I had held you as you bled over my hands and I watched my friend die.

I wish you had known then what I know now. Maybe you would have been less afraid to go. Maybe in seeing that death can be a kindness you would have let one other man die in order to save yourself.

In a few years’ time people will find both you and I again, after our bodies have gone to the earth. Perhaps you will grow into a cherry tree and your petals will make snow in spring. Maybe I will become an oak and provide shade to men like me, sitting against a trunk for a few minutes of peace. I hope by then the whole world will once again have peace.

I felt myself go. It was a gentle tugging, each sense slipping away like the tide ebbing to the moon. First was my hearing; the wailing and clatter behind me gradually faded into nothing. Next to leave was any feeling in my body and I suddenly felt alien without the pounding of my head, the throbbing of my hand, the burn and strain of my muscles. I couldn’t remember the last time I was completely without pain. My vision went more slowly, the world distorting into diffused outlines and flares of golden light. It was the most beautiful I’d ever seen it.

It is the living who mourn, not the dead. Death is hardest for those we leave behind. I let rest take me, I gave in, but held on for one more moment before my eyes closed to feel the last thing I would ever feel. A sorrow not for myself, but that _come back to us_ is but a forlorn plea I am now never able to fulfil.


End file.
